You are firstly a Performance Consultant and not a Training Consultant

A request was sent by the Sales Centre Business Team (incoming telephone centre) to Training to conduct a refresher training programme for its Small Business Power Plan, a set of business telecommunication services. The brief that I was given by Susan Mockford, the Manager, was simple:
“Reps (or staff members of the Sales Centre) were not confident in selling these ‘Power Plans’. They were uncomfortable with answering queries from customers.”
That was about it. Now go and develop a training programme that meets the needs of the Team.
Now, if you have read my earlier article on ‘Training: A Panacea of Organisational Pain?”, you will have realised that ‘Go and See’ is a big part of what I advocate. Because as much as Management likes to believe what they want to believe, the issues are deeper than what appears on the surface.
In addition, when a manager gets too close to the action, it is sometime difficult to see the forest from the trees and s/he may be seduced by what s/he wants to hear. It is always good to have a 3rd party to give a second opinion.
I avoided defining my role as a “Training Consultant” but took on that of a “Performance Consultant” – a helicopter view. These were what I found:

• The critical Power Plans had many concepts that nobody really know. Over time, the Business Team developed sub-products, e.g. Nominated Number, Frequently Called Number, Calling circle, and then Calling Group. None of these had written definitions and resided in the heads of team leaders; some ‘older’ leaders remembered but no one had a reserve of all information,

• In some plans, there was no clear expectation as to the number of allocated phones under Nominated Numbers. As the creator of the services moved on, the rules were non-existent,

• Some plans, e.g. the Extension Calling Plan, were hardly used and not documented. Hence, when a customer rang, no one, including the back office, knew what to do,

• The processes were unclear and confusing. Reps could choose whatever code they felt were appropriate to put into the system,

• When a rep forgets to input tandem numbers into the plan, a requirement for the Power Zero Plan, customers were charged the full rate when a different rate should apply. Net of it? Angry customers,

• Frontline procedural documents were not owned by anyone. Hence, documents were never updated.

To go ahead and train based on the information that we had would have been a disaster. There was a need to do more preparation work before training. This was not really a ‘People’ issue; this was a process and knowledge bank issue.
Hence, we completely overhaul the procedures and knowledge bank.

• Marketing provided clarity across the terms for the various Power Plans. Where things were unsure, we kept digging,

• The knowledge bank was then cleaned and tidied with the new information in it, including very clear definitions and business rules,

• Some plans had to be removed and others streamlined. The greater the complexities of Power Plans, the more problems we anticipated.

With these steps, we were ready for training. But this was more of a ‘Knowledge’ training and main job of the training designer was to make it simple through conceptualisation, that is, arranging all the concepts in a simple manner for all to understand. A skilled training designer must possess this ability.
Training took place in September. When we did a ‘Before’ and ‘After’ measurement of the plans, we were able to attain Kirkpatrick’s Level 4 challenge on ‘Return on Investment’. We collated the numbers and ensured that they were not skewed by marketing events. Thankfully, there was only one event which we could ‘control’.
Susan was impressed. In fact, with the Farm Plan, a lucrative product, the jump was practically from zero. Although November had a dip as we moved into Christmas, the overall total numbers was up from 96 in August to 204 in Oct. Below is a table showing the true achievements:

There is always more to training than meets the eye if you choose not to be a post-box.

Elevator Speech to Promote Staff Thinking

I was in an elevator going up. A courier runner had just entered the elevator. And then, he hesitated. When I reached my floor, which incidentally was the top level, the courier runner remained inside. Apparently, he had forgotten which floor he was meant to be going to. Although he knew the department, the floor was not indicated.

Every day, I would observe this same behaviour meted out by various people. As an idea, I decided to put in a suggestion into our official Staff Suggestion Scheme; why not include in the name of the department next to the elevator’s button? I thought nothing of it until I received a reply that it could not be done ‘because departments do move’. In my head, I was wondering, how often do departments move floors? Fortunately, my boss was wondering the same thing.

But it took us three whole months before the idea came into fruition. My boss had to take this suggestion to the Productivity Steering Committee chaired by the 3^rd ranking person in the company. The Committee, which consisted of managers in the Executive Team, met once a month. At the meeting, my suggestion was one of the items tabled. The Chairman turned to Michael, General Manager of Properties and basically asked him what the issues were. Michael promised the team that he would report back the following week after talking to his manager.

Guess what? After 3 months from my suggestion, the department name now sits next to the appropriate floor button. Organisations are not naturally structured to listen to their staff members for improvements, especially if these members are front-liners or come from another department.

Organisations consist of people of different personalities and outlook. Some personality types do not favour new ideas because the profile prefers things to be status quo. In addition, when we have a Manager-Staff or a Department to Department interaction, the element of power comes into play because most managers (or departmental experts) see themselves as being the sole custodians of ideas. It is always easier to say ‘no’ to an idea then to agree because two things happen:

• It shows that the manager/ experts knows better, and
• It reduces the need for the manager to ‘think’ because ‘thinking’ is an intense activity. Routine work is more ‘predictable’ and is ‘lazy on the brain’. ‘Change’ is too tough.

Most people gravitate toward a problem being more complex than it can possibly be. The problem with us is the more we think, the more complex it gets.

Consider the case of the elevator sitting outside of a building. A group of architects and engineers was trying to figure out how to put an elevator inside a building. Even as an engineer was viewing the El Cortez from outside to figure out how to resolve the problem, a bellboy suggested simply, “Why not put the elevator outside?”. And the world's first outside hydraulic glass elevator was created in 1956.

Hence, organisations build structures to get people to contribute their thinking. And good organisations see thinking as an essential culture. Consider the time when I was with the newspaper group again. Can you imagine the 3^rd ranked person and the executive managers of the leadership team meeting once a month just to review ideas submitted by staff members? Or consider the influence of the CEO of Marriott Hotel Group who reads all the complaint and complimentary letters coming in from their customers? Surely they have better things to do than that. Or do they? At senior level, their action has a telling effect on shaping the culture. They are role models. It tells you how serious they are at what they do.

When I was a manager having staff members reporting to me, one of the things that I am always mindful is that as staff, we should never suffer from organisational incest. We must look out. So, twice a month, I expect my staff to visit another company and learn one or two things new that they can use in our organisation. I arranged for the organisation to pay for their visits. And I ask them for a one-pager report. That way, I kept staff members fresh and enthusiastic and always looking for new and creative way to improve.

So, if our organisation really wants to believe in its people, it starts with senior management role-modeling and an organisation structure that builds new ideas and promotes managers who do.

Food for thought even as you are in an elevator.